ASL Diary Episode 1: A New Hope

Dear ASL Diary, sometimes people start a diary when they set out on a journey even though they don't know how far they will get. Maybe you will be a documentation of failure, maybe you will become a nice account of the rediscovery of a great game I haven't touched in a long time. Time will tell.

For the last few years my ASL collection has been gathering dust in the basement (the usual story - no time, no space to leave games set up, no opponents, and too many other easier options for the limited gaming times I manage to find).

However, about a year ago or so I discovered an ASL podcast, and just as I am probably spending more time listening to Magic the Gathering podcasts than I spend actually playing that game [although I do play Magic occasionally], I spent a lot of time listening to past episodes of the 2 Half-Squads, a podcast that hits just the right mix of topical discussion, information, fun banter and the occasional offtopic excursions.

I have still not caught up with the most recent episodes of that podcast (I'm currently listening to episode 61 and the most recent one as I write this is #76). But listening on a regular basis brought my mind back to a lot of ASL stuff, reminded me of a lot of half (but apparently not completely) forgotten rules lore and at least made the thought of pulling out my old ASL rules binders again a thinkable one.

And then a few months ago my regular games shop (Spiele-Pyramide in Karlsruhe), who knows my gaming preferences well and is good at suggesting stuff that suits my tastes, told me that they came across a distributor who can supply them with ASL stuff. So I wrote a huge email suggesting a hand full of items they might want get (starter kit, rule book, Beyond Valor and another entry level set and one or two more recent publications), and they have a copy of Starter Kit 3 and the Festung Budapest historical module available now.

I re-read the basic chapters of the rule book in June/July and started looking for occasional opportunities to play. 

Future episodes of this diary will show whether it worked out (and if there are none, it didn't :).